pocket nearest his heart a chapter of 'Gunnar', and read it to
us.

Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have
both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the youthful
sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect. I believe it
was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a 'stev'
together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones
of the poet's voice in the poet's verse. These were most characteristic
of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall
beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.

Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the
professor's roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the
gentle event. Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I
think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon
each other in every waking moment. I had just learned to know Bjornson's
stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in
even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me
with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that
brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the
speech of the common people. Literature was Boyesen's religion more than
the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had both been spiritually
nurtured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we found ourselves
on common ground in our worship of it. I was a decade his senior, but at
thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to
rejoice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an incandescent
poetic mass. I have known no man who loved poetry more generously and
passionately; and I think he was above all things a poet. His work took
the shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave it all a
touch of grace and beauty. Some years after this first meeting of ours I
remember a pathetic moment with him, when I asked him why he had not
written any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad
astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not all poetry. In
those earlier days I believe he really thought it was!

Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that
stretched almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see
the poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art. He did
battle valiantly for tha